It’s relatively clear that Francis is working with the integral ecology proposed by the Brazilian liberation theologian Leonardo Boff, who draws on the general ecology of Félix Guattari and the integral ecology proposed by the cultural historian Thomas Berry. Regarding Boff’s influence, consider the Pope’s allusion to Boff’s Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor. “Today, however, we have to realize that a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor” (# 49). The Pope’s sense of integral ecology is also clearly influenced by the ecological sensibility of St. Francis of…

*Note that these two talks are not in my track. I’ll have to leave my track on Saturday afternoon for two speaking engagements in other tracks. It’s going to be a crazy weekend, with something like 80 tracks running simultaneously.

Bernardo Kastrup, a computer engineer who has written a few books on metaphysics, recently posted a short essay called “The Threat of Panpsychism: A Warning.” I found the essay somewhat encouraging if only because it is another signal that contemporary philosophy (both within and outside academia) is moving beyond the tired “materialism v. anything else” debate and toward more interesting and relevant debates, like that between pluralistic panpsychism and monistic idealism. Kastrup defends the latter, but only against a rather oversimplified, caricatured version of panpsychism. I wanted to respond to some of his “warnings” by offering a more nuanced rendering of panpsychism that has arisen from my study of Alfred North Whitehead and William James.

Karstrup begins by defining panpsychism. He picks out two basic interpretations: 1) one suggests consciousness is a fundamental property of matter just like mass and charge, etc., and 2) the other suggests that consciousness is intrinsic to matter–that it does not inhere in matter alongside other properties like mass and charge, but that these properties are just the external faces of what, from the inside, experiences itself as conscious. These interpretations, Kastrup admits, differ only in their subtleties. Through Kastrup names no names, the two positions sound similar to the panpsychisms articulated by Galen Strawson and David Chalmers.

What is unique about the Whiteheadian process-relational version of panpsychism is that it rejects the substance-property and identity-based ontology shared by Strawson and Chalmers. Kastrup’s main concern with panpsychism (so defined) is that it “fragments” consciousness into atomic bits; further, he worries that these mind bits remain determined by material bits. But these concerns are, I argue, resolved by the process-relational version. Although Whitehead’s panpsychism does involve the particulation of psyche, these psychic particles (W. calls them actual occasions) are each and all internally related and co-constituting; they are interpenetrating drops of experience, not isolated monads of private mentality. Fragmentation is thereby averted.

Whitehead’s version of panpsychism doesn’t rush to reduce matter to mind (or to reduce the multiplicity of materiality to the identity/unity of mentality). Whitehead’s whole philosophical method is designed to avoid the sort of reductionistic overstatements that lead to absolute idealisms and absolute materialisms alike. His is not a polemical but a diplomatic philosophy, always searching for the middle ground that incorporates the elucidatory aspects of all approaches in search of an adequate compromise. Whitehead’s approach allows us to understand mind and matter, as well as wholeness and particularity, as equally necessary, integral phases in the ongoing process of cosmogenesis.

I wonder what Kastrup would make of William James’ little book A Pluralistic Universe, wherein James articulates some rather strong arguments against monistic idealism and in favor of a kind of pluralistic panpsychism. To my mind, what Kastrup arguing for in this essay is only another form of reductionism–reduction to Unity and Mind instead of to Matter. This is reductionistic, I would argue, because it negates the variety of modes of existence that make up our cosmic community. Ontological pluralism seems more true to experience (both common every day experience AND mystical experience), since it doesn’t deny the possibility of unity, it only denies that things are necessarily unified. Necessary unity is politically frightening to me. It is too fascist, too totalitarian. I prefer democracy both politically and ontologically. Order, oneness, unity, etc must be freely affirmed, freely achieved. They cannot be metaphysically imposed.

There is much more to say about all of this, of course. I am hoping to provoke Kastrup into a longer discussion, since I agree with William James that the contrast between pluralism and monism is the most pregnant of all the contrasts in philosophy.

I am writing to you as a concerned Berkeley citizen and a life-long resident of the San Francisco Bay Area. There is much that I love about living in the East Bay, but one that I appreciate most is the easy accessibility of the beautiful forested hills rising above Oakland and Berkeley. To have such a thriving ecosystem right on the doorstep of one’s urban home is truly a gift to the residents of the East Bay, allowing one to easily leave the confines of the city to explore the paths through the woods and have a taste of nature without needing to drive long distances.

Thus I was devastated when the Oakland Wildfire Plan recently came to my attention, with the proposal to clear-cut the forest and spray toxic herbicides on the 150-year-old ecosystem. I recognize that because many of the trees in the forest are…

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Typically, Buddhist-inspired forms of meditation invite us to observe the emptiness of all forms, whether those forms are objects in the world around us or we ourselves as subjects, as souls. Nothing abides, all forms are passing away, or changing into other forms as the old dissolve. Panta rhei, as Heraclitus put it: everything flows, everything streams. But what if, instead of trying to identify, paradoxically, with being nobody or being soulless, we see instead that the soul is not a being at all, but a becoming? What would it mean, then, not to be soul, but to become soul?

The ancient analogy likening souls to stars can help us here. Souls are like stars. Stars are not things, they are transformative happenings, alchemical events, streams of activity. Every second our Sun transforms 9 billion pounds of itself into light. In the half hour we spend together this morning, it will have burned up 15 trillion pounds of itself, releasing that mass as energy that streams to Earth to feed and sustain all life. 15 trillion pounds is equivalent to about 7 ½ thousand Golden Gate Bridges (the bridge weighs about 800,000 tons).

Souls are like stars. Consider this analogy in light of Emerson’s statement from his essay “Over-Soul”:

“From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all.”

I invite you in our meditation this morning to consider your soul, not as a fixed identity that sets you apart from me, but as a streaming influence constantly transforming what is within you into something to be shared with others. The soul is what shines between us, what allows us to commune with each other. It is an outward flowing light, and an inward sensitivity to the light of others streaming in. Let’s become souls by becoming like stars; let’s let the light shine through us.

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My fiance Becca Tarnas just launched the website for her archetypal cosmology consultation practice. Her approach to psyche-cosmos correlations could be understood as an extension of depth psychology beyond just the personal and (human) collective unconscious into the interplanetary unconscious. It is a form of psychoplanetary therapy. Check it out.

“The stars are like letters which inscribe themselves at every moment in the sky . . . . Everything in the world is full of signs. . . . All events are coordinated. . . . All things depend on each other; as has been said, ‘Everything breathes together.’”– Plotinus

I am excited to announce my archetypal astrology counseling practice, and the launch of my website ArchetypalPrism.com. The archetypal perspective has been a continual presence throughout my life, and I have been working intensively with astrology since 2011. The form of astrology I practice is known as Archetypal Cosmology and focuses primarily on the geometrical relationships between the planetary bodies of our solar system. I offer astrological consultations that explore both the natal chart—the position of the planets at the moment of one’s birth—as well as personal transits—the relationships formed between the continuous movements of the planets and the natal chart. If you…

“Ritual for me is a kind of like serious play. It’s play that you take seriously. As play, though, it doesn’t have an end outside of itself. It’s not like work or labor then in that sense, where you might be doing something now that may be grueling and difficult in order to produce a finished product…with play its about what’s happening in the act of doing it. I think ritual should be understood in the same way. And I think in our modern context, those people that still do participate in religious ritual think of it as a kind of work where you’re trying to prove yourself as a dedicated member of this or that religion, you’re trying to look good in God’s eyes, or whatever, and by approaching ritual in that way you’re blocking what actually functions as sort of the saving grace that one is trying produce…

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The photo is from last summer’s Burning Man festival, taken by Zipporah on Sunday morning while I sat in the Temple of Grace contemplating my life’s loves and losses. Later that night, the Temple collapsed in upon itself like a curtsying ballerina after burning for fifteen short minutes.

…….

I read the following prayer at the opening of a small medicine ceremony I participated in the night of the Winter Solstice. The Solstice prayer and the Temple photo seem to me to share a similar archetypal character.

Tonight we celebrate one of the deepest celestial mysteries to stir the sacred senses of our still youthful species. We watch in wonder as the Sun’s southward journey comes to a standstill. We honor the darkness this provides on this, the longest night in the history of the Earth. Tonight the Sun dies so that in three days it may be reborn to travel north again toward Spring. We give thanks for the balancing of Light and Dark, a mixture from out of which all Life springs forth. We trust in the Great Cosmic Cycle of Death and Rebirth, in the eternal rotation of the spheres of Heaven and Earth.

Day and night sides of Earth at the instant of the December 2014 solstice (2014 December 21 at 23:03 Universal Time). Note that the north polar region of Earth must endure 24 hours of night, while the south polar region gets to bask in 24 hours of daylight. Image credit: Earth and Moon Viewer

We trust that the Sun will return to shorten the night and to warm the Earth. We give thanks to the earth for faithfully receiving the luminous breath of the Sun, for giving birth through its sacred chemical kiss with the Sun to all plants and bacteria, fungi and animals. We honor the Earth’s sister, Luna, the Moon, who tonight will go down with the Sun on his journey through the underworld , granting us an even deeper plunge into darkness.

This is the longest night in Earth’s history because of the tidal deceleration caused by the Moon’s gravitational influence. As Earth’s rotation slows, she drifts ever so slightly further away from us, her longing unable to overcome the momentum flinging her away. It is symbolic of the tragic beauty giving meaning to all change, to all time. As the Sun enters Capricorn, we honor Saturn, Father Time, who rules over all finite things. Adrift amidst these great cosmic cycles, we gather together to give praise to our ancestors: to the stars overhead whose sacrificial deaths made our lives possible; to all the Earth-beings underfoot, who feed and clothe us; to the first human inhabitants of this land, the Ohlone indians, whose remains dated to 5,000 years ago can still be found buried beneath the pavement of Berkeley just west of this ceremony; and we thank the future beings who will be here after us. We thank them for continuing the evolutionary journey despite our generation’s disrespect for and childish treatment of Earth and her creatures.

We ask forgiveness for our forgetfulness, our irresponsibility, our misguided pride. We humble ourselves before all beings, past, present, and future. We plant ourselves as seeds in the soil of time and look ahead, guided by the Great Mystery toward which all beings are called. We offer ourselves for this Great Work. May we be partners with Levity/Light and Gravity/Darkness in their sacred marriage.

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I wanted to post a transcription of some reflections I shared during a medicine circle I participated in this past summer. Some of what came to me has had a big impact on my conceptualization of my dissertation thesis regarding the etheric (or plant-like) nature of Imagination.

It is such a privilege to speak later in the circle, just to be able to absorb everyone else’s experience before sharing my own. It is very grounding. Yesterday I hadn’t yet arrived, and so it was difficult for me to speak from my heart when I was sharing my intentions. I was still feeling uncertainty, wondering if I should be here, asking if I could afford this… I hadn’t yet allowed myself to accept that I had made the decision to be here. And then the rapé was offered. It literally blew the doubts and uncertainties out of my field of awareness and dropped me into what at first was just an intense somatic experience of numbness in my extremities. As that sensation subsided after a few moments, I reached a place of crystal clear clarity. I realized why I had decided to come here. The “reason” is not something I can explain rationally – it is more like a feeling of faithfulness. Later in the evening we drank the ayahuasca. After the first serving, I wasn’t experiencing very much. I felt pretty normal for the duration of that part of the ceremony. My mind was very active and the doubts came back again. I thought maybe this isn’t going to work, maybe this is going to be a long night. I wasn’t even nauseous – there was no change really in my consciousness. The chanting and ceremonial context certainly held me and gave me an experience but it wasn’t what I was hoping for entirely. Then I drank the second dose and it’s hard to tell how long it took, but it drastically altered my normal state of mind in a way I only became conscious of after the fact. At some point after drinking the second dose, maybe 30 minutes or an hour after, I became conscious again and realized I had been experiencing a vision of a beautiful infinitely-armed goddess who was dancing above me, lavishing me with love, care, and attention. I realized that I had been meditating on the question “who am I?” And yet until I became aware of it, I didn’t have any self-consciousness. There wasn’t an ego asking “who am I?”, it was just this experience of deepening into the mood or atmospheric feeling of this question and being answered by the presence of this pervasive feminine intelligence. Then we went outside. When I saw the stars the question that was orienting me shifted to: “what is this?”, “How is this possible?” Then I laid back and gazed at the night sky, holding that question. No immediate answer came. I was transfixed by its infinitude. Then [the shaman] invoked the spirit of the sky and that of the earth, at which point it became clear to me: “oh yeah, there is this too [patting the ground].” Then I found myself struggling for a moment to try to integrate the sky and the earth, their differences, the way they complement one another. And then the dried tobacco was passed around. I began meditating on plants as the essence of life. There are animals, too, but animals eat plants. So plants are what provide the foundation for all of life. I was just praying on the tobacco and realizing that plant life is what integrates earth and sky. Plants between earth and sky. The light of the sky summons the fertility of the earth and the child of their marriage is plant life. Then my mind kicked in and I wanted to understand more theoretically, “wow, how is that possible?” And then I realized I already know the answer, but that it’s not something I could explain in a scientific way. I’m holding the answer in here [points to chest]. Then I offered the tobacco to the fire and I realized that the reason life emerges is to experience the sacrifice of death. And that life is worth it even though when you’re born, the one thing that’s inevitable is that you are going to die. Somewhere in there is—maybe not the explanation—but at least the meaning or understanding I’ve been searching for. I realized that I knew the answer before I even asked the question.

In the year 1951, as recorded by the calendar of our world, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote to a potential publisher of his Lord of the Rings trilogy to describe the origin of his fantasy story:

“In order of time, growth and composition, this stuff began with me. I do not remember a time when I was not building it…I have been at it since I could write” (xi).

The imaginal flowering of Tolkien’s mythopoeic world was never separate from his real life identity. It grew from the soil of his own soul, from out of the wounds of his own real life world. His very sense of himself as a developing personality within a devolving late industrial society was coëval with his feeling for the courses charted by his characters through the story. His autobiography and his archeology of Middle-Earth were as one.

Though Tolkien is clearly an example of what our traditions of criticism have called a literary genius—a man singularly awakened to the world-making power of his Imagination—we must nonetheless grapple with the apparently contradictory metaphysical implications of his fantasy works: Art is not the privilege of a few especially talented human geniuses, but the shared intuition or common sense running through each and every creature in the cosmos. It is not Tolkien’s imagination that created Middle-Earth, just as it is not any particular person’s imagination that has created our earth as it exists in the year 2014. It is the same Divine Cosmic Imagination that has created both, the one through Tolkien, the other through all of us together. A genius inspires every one of us from the dumbest to the most erudite in our thoughts, and in our hearts, and even in our very cells, the molecules organizing our cells, the protons and electrons whose dancing in currents of light grant motion to those molecules. The process of cosmic creation is the locus of primary genius. All of nature is inspired Art. The cosmic imagination has called the human into being. Human Art is nature’s way of becoming conscious of its own creative process.

Unlike every other creature on Earth or above it, our human purpose is not pre-determined by our species. To be human is to lack any such purpose but that we create for ourselves. In a participatory universe such as ours, the only purpose given us by our Creator is to become like him, to become, as Tolkien referred to it, a “sub-creator.”

The subtending power of Imagination over human life is such that, lacking a positive desire for creation, a creative impulse, a sense of self-esteem in our ability to create, we quickly sink into the darkness of world-negating nihilism. Cosmic meaning is never prescribed; we are called instead to participate in its making. The purpose we have been given by our Maker is to participate in His making.

It isn’t that the lack of a creative desire to participate in life dissolves the illusions of Imagination, leaving behind nothing but bare biological survival and the blind and stupid churning of matter. It’s that, for better or worse, with or without such positivity, there is no escape from Imagination: it encompasses the whole of both life and death, body and soul, yay and nay. To be sub-creators is our doom. If we do not use our power of divine likeness to create beauty, we risk destroying it. We are not permitted to abstain, to be spectators on an already made reality. For there to be any reality at all, we must participate in its making, whether positively or negatively.

Reality is never purely what it is because it always comes mixed up with Images. Reality, it turns out, is not a finished unity, but a plurality of interwoven processes. Every supposedly simple and finished reality is but a ego-generated image, a mirage, an idol. What happens is that an ongoing creality is mistaken for a completed reality. This mistake leads not only to nihilism, but to resentment of the world’s becoming.

Resentment or enchantment: these are the two paths open to we earthly sub-creators. Both bring forth a certain shape of subjectivity: the former that of an embattled ego who has externalized blame upon an enemy in order to feel expiated for its own failure to faithfully participate; the latter that of an ego innocently open to the eucatastrophic surprises of a cosmic story still in the process of being told.

Tolkien’s Art invites us to step into our roles as cosmic artisans, just at that moment in world history when the stars have fallen and so much else seems headed for disaster.

Tolkien’s Art is not what it at first appears. More artisanal than artistic, the products of Tolkien’s sub-creation “arose in [his] mind as ‘given’ things.” Always,” writes Tolkien, “I had the sense of recording what was already ‘there,’ somewhere: not of ‘inventing’” (xii). Tolkien’s mode of creation is also a mode of discovery. This seeming contradiction is easier to grasp if we consider it alongside Tolkien’s belief that “myths are largely made of truth” (xv). The “wide-spread motives or elements” expressed in the world’s mythologies (known to Tolkien’s contemporary Carl Jung as “archetypes”) are such mythic truths. It is no surprise, then, that these archetypes were in some sense re-discovered by Tolkien in the course of his imaginal descent into Middle-Earth. We need not decide whether sub-creation is true creation, or simple discovery, since Imagination functions according to its own oscillatory logic allowing it to hover indeterminately between pairs of seeming opposites (creation/discovery, self/world, intellect/sensation, spirit/matter, and so forth). It is from this unruly oscillation that all of Imagination’s mysterious power derives.

Tolkien says of all his artwork that it is fundamentally concerned with the problem of the relation of Art (and Sub-creation) to Primary Reality (xiii). Primary Reality is the world of daily life, of biological struggle, and, eventually, of death. The sub-creator, in bringing forth a Secondary Reality (made not of mass in motion, but of story and myth, of image and emotion), expresses a desire which not only has no ordinary biological function, but which indeed usually finds itself in strife with these functions (xiii). Despite its spiritual motives, the sub-creative desire “is at once wedded to a passionate love of the real primary world, and hence filled with the sense of mortality, and yet unsatisfied by it” (xiii). Death, even if imaginary, is no less real for all that. We human sub-creators have, again, two paths open to us upon encountering it.

The first option is to resent death as a curse, and so to “rebel against the laws of the Creator” by employing various devices meant to mechanically stave off the inevitable. This is a fallen form of creativity in service of the denial of death, which cannot but lead to the desire for ever more Power. For Tolkien, this desire for Power can lead only to an obsession with “the Machine.” The Machine necessarily possesses its master (and so inverts the master-slave relationship). It represents a form of black magic that is concerned only to make the will quicker and more effective, a technological magic accomplished by external devices, rather than by the innate power of Imagination.

The second option is to accept death as a gift from God, to sub-create out of sheer love of this world without jealousy or possessiveness. This is easier if we follow Tolkien’s advice by looking at things “through Elvish minds” instead of the human ones we’re used to. The object of Elvish magic “is Art, not Power, sub-creation, not domination and tyrannous re-forming of creation” (xii). Though “it is not the legendary mode of talking,” Tolkien assures us that his “elves” are really nothing more than “an apprehension of a part of human nature” (xvi). No doubt it is the higher part; though of course, the Elves were the first to fall.

“There cannot be any ‘story’ without a fall…at least not for human minds as we know them and have them.” (xv)

In the mythic mode of speaking, the Elves are said to be the Firstborn of Ilúvatar, humans their Followers. Taking the Elvish view on things gives we mere mortals the opportunity to raise our attention from the mud into which we have fallen to dwell again at least for a moment beneath the stars in the sky and to contemplate the heavenly mission their light was sent to earth to share with us.

“The doom of the Elves,” writes Tolkien,

“is to be immortal, to love the beauty of the world, to bring it to full flower with their gifts of delicacy and perfection, to last while it lasts, never leaving it even when ‘slain,’ but returning–and yet, when the Followers come, to teach them, and make way for them, to ‘fade’ as the Followers grow and absorb the life from which both proceed.” (xiv)

“The Doom (or Gift) of Men,” he continues,

“is mortality, freedom from the circles of the world. Since the point of view of the whole cycle is the Elvish, mortality is not explained mythically: it is a mystery of God which no more is known than that ‘what God has purposed for Men is hidden': a grief and an envy to the immortal Elves.”

From the Elvish perspective, death is Ilúvatar’s Gift to humans. Elves envy humans because our love for the world is, at least potentially, so much more beautiful than theirs. Why? Because we mortals have the choice to love one another, and to love the world, despite death. Eucatastrophe, is the highest of the Arts, the most beautiful of all Nature’s works.

Only by incarnating into the physical world and passing through the finitude of death could God’s Love become truly infinite. This is the Creator’s great secret, kept even from the angels until (if I might risk an allegorical translation) the Christ Event. Until that “turning point in time,” the Drama had remained incomplete…“incomplete in each individual ‘god,’ and incomplete if all the knowledge of the pantheon were pooled…For the Creator had not revealed all.” (xiv)

Embracing death lovingly despite not being certain of its meaning requires a redemptive act of Imagination, a sort of faith, since for Imagination believing is seeing.

The same sort of imaginal faith is required to participate in the meaning of Tolkien’s cosmogony as depicted in The Silmarillion. Tolkien recounts the creation of the world through the musical call and response of Ilúvatar, the All-Father, the One, and his noetic offspring, the Ainur, or Holy Ones. Together, all the Ainur sang in accord with Ilúvatar’s theme:

“…a sound arose of endless interchanging melodies woven in harmony that passed beyond hearing into the depths and into the heights, and the places of the dwelling of Ilúvatar were filled to overflowing, and the music and the echo of the music went out into the Void, and it was not void.”

But then, Melkor, the Ainur with the greatest gifts of power and knowledge, began to

“interweave matters of his own imagining that were not in accord with the theme of Ilúvatar; for he sought therein to increase the power and glory of the part assigned to himself.” (16)

Not only Elves and Humans, but even Angels are subject to the mythic law of the Fall. Like all evil, Melkor’s fallenness stems from the same root as goodness. He only began to sing out of tune with the other Ainur because he had gone off alone in an effort to fill in the emptiness of the Void where Ilúvatar’s song had not yet reached. His efforts made his heart grow hot with possessiveness. Alas, his will was lost to the lure of Ilúvatar’s music and he turned selfward, instead. Melkor’s rebellion caused heaven’s harmony to falter as many of the other Ainur began attuning with him instead of Ilúvatar. Soon, all about the throne of Ilúvatar “there was a raging storm, as of dark waters that made war upon one another in an endless wrath.” Ilúvatar contended with Melkor, not by negating his “loud and vain” improvisations, but by weaving even the most triumphant of Melkor’s dissonant notes back into the deeply solemn and for that reason immeasurably beautiful pattern of His cosmic melody.

“Mighty are the Ainur,” said Ilúvatar,

“and mightiest among them is Melkor; but that he may know, and all the Ainur, that I am Ilúvatar…And thou, Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.” (17)

The universe presents human beings with an opportunity to trust the creative process that has birthed them, to trust it even when its path seems dark and difficult, even when its products seem measly and powerless before the weight of the primary world of toil and death. We can embrace mortal sub-creation without resenting the task by realizing that death only appears to the fallen ego to be an enemy. For the ego redeemed by Imagination, death is revealed to be God’s greatest gift to Creation, a sacred secret entrusted not to gods but to humans, those made in His Image and after His likeness.

“The great policies of world history, ‘the wheels of the world,’” wrote Tolkien,

“are often turned not by the Lords and Governors, even gods, but by the seemingly unknown and weak–owing to the secret life in creation, and the part unknowable to all wisdom but One, that resides in the intrusions of the Children of God into the Drama.” (xvii)

*All citations from second edition of The Silmarillion ed. by Christopher Tolkien (Houghton Mifflin, 1999).

This fall, the California Institute of Integral Studies and the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness Program is hosting a unique conference honoring the lifetime achievements of Stanislav Grof in the several fields to which he has made such major contributions, including consciousness research, psychiatry and psychology, psychedelic studies, religious studies, philosophy, and esotericism. Scholars and researchers from many disciplines will explore and build upon Grof’s extraordinary expansion of our understanding of the human psyche as well as the range and power of psychotherapeutic approaches. Grof will respond to the diverse presentations, followed by open dialogue with the participants. Presenters will include:Christopher Bache, Ph.D.; John Buchanan, Ph.D.; Fritjof Capra; Rick Doblin, Ph.D.; Jorge Ferrer, Ph.D.; Leonard Gibson, Ph.D.; Charles Grob, M.D.; Paul Grof, M.D.; Stanislav Grof, M.D.; Diane Haug, M.A., LPCC; William Keepin, Ph.D.; Sean Kelly, Ph.D.; Ralph Metzner, Ph.D.; Annie Mithoefer, B.S.N; Michael Mithoefer, M.D.; Thomas Roberts, Ph.D.; Tav Sparks; Richard Tarnas, Ph.D.; Kylea Taylor, M.S., M.F.T.; and Jenny Wade, Ph.D.

The word “psychedelic” was coined in the 1950s by the British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond in a letter exchanged with the famed author and philosopher Aldous Huxley. Osmond had recently supplied Huxley with a dose of mescaline. Huxley later sent Osmond a rhyme containing his own suggested neologism: “To make this trivial world sublime, take half a gram of phanerothyme” (phanero meaning ‘to show’ or ‘make visible’ and thymos meaning ‘spiritedness’ in Greek). Osmond countered with the lines “To fathom Hell or soar angelic, just take a pinch of psychedelic.” The word means “soul manifesting” (from ψυχή, meaning psyche or soul in Latin), and δήλος, delos, meaning ‘manifest’). Osmond was among the first medical scientists to study the effects of Albert Hoffman’s recently invented chemical compound LSD-25. He was convinced that the psychedelic state could help psychiatrists understand and treat schizophrenia.

Many burners would probably agree that psychedelics offer treatments for a whole variety of individual ailments, whether alcoholism or addiction, PTSD, depression, anxiety due to being diagnosed with a terminal illness, etc. I want to suggest that psychedelics may also provide us with at least part of the solution to wider social, economic, and ecological problems. They are not a cure all, but given the short time-frame human civilization has to fundamentally transform itself before cascading catastrophe drives our species and many others beside into extinction, I think our only hope comes in the form of a drastic chemical—or better, alchemical—intervention. Only the re-birth of a psychedelic religion can save us now.

The global religion of consumer capitalism is predicated upon the belief that consciousness is fundamentally atomic and individualistic, that it is produced by the brain and contained within the skull. The word capital derives from the Latin word “caput,” meaning “head,” and originally referred to the number of cattle a rich person owned. Today, as always, rich people also own human heads. One of the principle lessons of psychedelics as far as I can tell is that, as Daniel Pinchbeck put it, they “break open the head,” revealing the cosmological ground of consciousness. Richard Doyle, author of Darwin’s Pharmacy, goes so far as to rename psychedelics “ecodelics” because of the way they dissolve the skin-thin boundary between human beings and their earthly habitats. What does it mean that so many plants and fungi contain psychoactive analogs of the human brain’s endogenous neurochemicals? Banisteriopsis caapi, psilocybin mushrooms, ergot fungus, cannabis—even our front lawns contain trace amounts of DMT! The nervous system is an ecologically extended network of chemical interactions. The human brain has been co-evolving with these other organisms for tens of thousands of years. Consciousness is not in the head. Consciousness is an emergent, symbiotic process that is planetary in extent.

It’s no mistake that religion of consumer capitalism requires that these substances be illegal. In order for the global economy to function, we have to continue to believe that we are skin-encapsulated egos (as Alan Watts put it) and that the meaning of life is determined by how much we own. We are raised to believe that human nature is basically selfish, that nature is basically cruel, and death is the end, so we may as well push others out of the way to get as much as we can while we’re still alive. We have to continue to commit what the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead called the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” by attributing more value to paper or plastic money than to human relationships, human lives, or the lives of other species. Our civilization is willing to destroy the entire planetary ecosystem to maintain corporate profit margins.

Have you ever taken a look at a $20 bill while tripping? Try it next time. I can’t help but laugh in astonishment whenever I do. This is the lifeblood of our civilization? We forget so easily that money is merely symbolic. You can’t eat it, drink it, or make love to it. When we put a bill on the counter or swipe our credit card at Starbucks, we act as though some metaphysical law forces the barista to make us our latte. In fact, we are entering into a social agreement. Capitalism does everything in its power to background this agreement, to background the alienating social relations that are required for the system to function. Capitalism tricks us into thinking that money is the only real measure of value and that this value necessarily determines the course of our lives. I’d wager that American money is green because this leads us to unconsciously associate it with photosynthesizing plants—which by the way are the only truly energy producing organisms on the planet. All the energy on earth enters into the food chain because plants have learned to transform sunlight into carbs. Not to mention the fact that most of the energy driving the global economy comes from fossilized plants.

Capitalism is a form of black magic. It is a dark, soul- and earth-destroying religion. Like all religions, it’s founded on certain rituals: shopping, working, watching TV or otherwise being inundated by advertisements, etc. It has its holy sites: malls, movie theaters, car dealerships. And it has its crusades: wars in the Middle East on behalf of “freedom” and “democracy” (code words for capitalism). Most modern industrial people think of themselves as entirely secular, but no religious believer ever considers their own religion to be just another religious belief system. No, our capitalist civilization, like all prior civilizations, thinks it has found the one true rational way to do things.

The reason I think psychedelics provide part of the solution to our crisis is that they allow our cultural conditioning to fall away, permitting us to re-imagine our values, our symbols, and our stories. They reveal the deeper connections between all things, the way the very idea of property or ownership does violence to the creative and sacred dimension of the universe. They allow us to rediscover the mystery of existence that has always been hidden in plain site. Psychedelic chemicals catalyze the formation of new rituals. Normally, ritualization is an unconscious process that takes many generations to take shape. Unfortunately, we don’t have many generations. If our civilization cannot fundamentally transform itself within the space of a few years, the odds of our survival are slim. Don’t get me wrong, these substances are extremely dangerous. They come with huge risks. Anyone ingesting them risks losing their mind. Of course, the default mind is suffering from a disease. Maybe losing it isn’t such a bad idea.

I attended the recent conference of the International Big History Association. The association is oriented toward researching and teaching “Big History,” which aims (as their website says) to “understand the integrated history of the Cosmos, Earth, Life, and Humanity,” specifically by means of “the best available empirical evidence and scholarly methods.” That opens up the field of history into a comprehensive and cross-disciplinary account of the entire 13.8 billion year history of our universe.

Big History is far from alone in its aim to articulate an integrated and evolutionary vision of matter, life, and humanity. Multiple scholarly fields and schools of thought share the integrative aims of Big History (e.g., the universe story, the field of religion and ecology, integral theory, ecofeminism, complexity theory, posthumanities, process philosophy). Big historians still have much to learn from those and other integrative and transdisciplinary sources of evolutionary knowledge.